Sure it does. We might want to be able to study it some day, we don’t know what might be in the atmosphere, we don’t know what extraterrestrial life might be like (there are extreme thermophyles and halophyles on earth for example, and even if not for life then there could be geological or meteorological research to be done) but the other reasons I gave should be more than sufficient.

I assume you’re talking about debris that is already in space…. Well, there are many, many problems with this idea.

1. getting all the debris together, in one place, to put on a rocket would be massively difficult.

2. it’s not a matter of just aiming it towards the sun and firing a rocket. I mean, you could do it that way, but it would be massively inefficient. You would have to burn retrograde compared to earth’s orbit to lower the perihelion of your probe, so there’s no “missing Venus and hitting the sun”, if you miss your target you’re just in interplanetary space for however many years until you hit who knows what, or most likely forever.

3. getting all of this out of low earth orbit would be massively inefficient as well. It would be much, much easier to deorbit it safely into earth, aiming at oceans and/or unpopulated regions.

4. we don’t want to contaminate Venus unnecessarily.

Sure, but there are a few problems with that.

1. to see the earth from millions of light years away would require a telescope that is beyond the realm of imagination. The andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million LY away, so think about resolving a single star in andromeda, and then think about resolving something much smaller in the glare of a star. But you did say a telescope strong enough, so….

2. however many light years away you send the telescope, it will take that many years for the signal to return to earth. So if you sent the telescope to Andromeda 2.5 MLY from earth, you would get images back in 2.5 million years, of what would be then 5 million years ago.

3. if there is intelligent life on earth in 2.5 million years; it will certainly be different than today. To give some perspective, that was when the first Homo habilis were differentiating from Australopithecus. I think it’s doubtful that our computers will be able to talk to each other when the signal arrives.

4. similar to the problem in resolution of the telescope, keeping a radio signal coherent over that amount of space would be a heck of an engineering challenge and take a tremendous amount of energy.

Regarding Elon Musk, just remember; prosecute wants prosecute’s pronouns to be prosecute and fauci. I say we keep calling fauci that until the day prosecute dies, I mean it’s what prosecute wants, who are we to deny fauci?

I was being a bit tongue in cheekical.

I read the article. It was more academical than that, but that was the upshot.

Science absolutely needs history and history absolutely needs science. One is how I make my living, the other is a hobby, but both are about understanding how and why things are the way they are.